The Dodo Archive

Grizzly Bear Nearly Eats GoPro, Instead Creates Brilliant Footage

One grizzly's investigation -- and near-ingestion -- of a stationary camera made for some pretty wild footage, after naturalist Brad Josephs filmed the grizzly nearly swallowing his GoPro camera whole.

In the midst of filming the Great Bear Stakeout, Josephs attached his GoPro camera to a rock with a rubber band before the bear came trundling along to find it. To his surprise, he got some unexpected footage of the inside of a bear's mouth. Josephs writes on his YouTube page, "Amazingly there was no damage to the camera!"

For obvious reasons, cameras like these aren't a normal feature of a grizzly's diet. Most of the time, these omnivores are sinking their teeth into berries, roots, grasses, fungi, deer, elk, fish, dead animals and insects.

But despite those fearsome teeth, grizzlies aren't doing so well -- once roaming North America in numbers as strong as 50,000, the species is down to about 1,800 bears, in just five populations in the lower 48 states, according to Defenders of Wildlife. Threatened by hunting and habitat loss, the species has been the target of aggressive conservation efforts for years. You can learn more about efforts to save the iconic grizzly bear here.